January 2006, Week 4
-- Hanging out at the HyperOffice

Small businesses that
can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on a Microsoft Exchange
Server, the software to go with it and a full-time tech specialist have
a couple of cheaper options.

The cheapest, of course, is to simply
collaborate on documents over the Web, e-mailing them back and forth.
But sharing documents in real time is better. We found a service called
HyperOffice that provides a master server and technical support for just
$6 to $9 a month for each user.

It lets you share calendars, project
schedules, spreadsheets and all other Microsoft Office files. You can
collaborate in an office, among widely separated colleagues or on the
road. Because there is a copy of whatever you do on your own local
machine as well as on the Web server, there is no need for backups.

To begin, you open a special HyperOffice Web
site as a Web folder in your browser. In Internet Explorer, that means
you check off a box that says "open as Web folder." Then you just drag
any Office document into the folder to upload it.

When you log in to your online workspace --
which is customizable with your company's logo -- you see a lot of
familiar icons. On the left, you have a panel for your mail, calendar,
documents, contacts, tasks, links, notes and reminders. In the center,
you have an area for today's news, messages, schedules and other
folders.

You can check the schedules of your
co-workers and send them an invitation to a meeting. You can let them
"vote" on a proposal. You can create special areas of access for
customers, so that when they log on, they see only the sales brochures
you want them to see.

The company offers a 30-day free trial. Setup is $40 if you decide to
sign up, but that includes configuring the site to suit your needs.
Works with Mac or PC. Read all about it at
www.hyperoffice.com.

Clipping Service

The free Clipmarks software makes cutting
something from a Web page as easy as cutting it out of a newspaper. Go
to
www.clipmarks.com.

The program puts a "clip this" icon on your
browser's toolbar. Click that icon and then click somewhere on the Web
page and you'll see an orange frame around the picture or item. The
frame is expandable. Click when it covers what you want to clip, then
click "save it," which is another choice on your toolbar.

The clip is saved on a Web site immediately
created to hold your clips, which can be accessed from anywhere you can
connect to the Web. The site is password protected and searchable, and
the clips can be e-mailed, printed or made public for anyone else to
browse on your site.

Internuts

www.johnhaller.com: This site
has free portable versions of popular programs, including the new Open
Office 2.01, which is similar to Microsoft Office and can work with
Office files. It takes up just 75 megabytes. Put the program on a flash
drive or other portable device, and you can work on documents on a
public computer without leaving a trace.

www.bagborroworsteal.com: Louis
Vuitton, eat your heart out. Right here you can rent designer handbags
from Louis, Hermes, Coach, Fendi, Gucci, Kate Spade, etc. Membership for
what the site calls "trendsetters" starts at $20 a month, plus $10
shipping and handling for each bag. You can choose from a selection of
more than 1,000 bags. If you sign up for the "princess" level, whatever
that means, you can choose from 1,200. If you move up to the "diva"
level, you get another 600 choices, way beyond those that any old
princess might carry.

Going for a Drive

ADS Technologies has a network drive case,
the NAS Drive Kit, for a little more than $100. This is right around the
same price as a drive case from Network Solutions that we wrote about a
couple weeks ago. The important difference between them is the ADS drive
case will accept ordinary IDE drives, the most common type, while the
Network Solutions case requires the new SATA drives. In either instance
the connections use an Ethernet cable to make the drive into a common
storage place for all the computers on a network; this could be for
either home or office.

You can get some pretty big storage this
way. A 500-gigabyte drive, which is huge storage, can be purchased for
around $340 these days; a 300-gig drive can be had for as little as $120
to $150 from discounters like pricegrabber.com. That would mean you
could have a nice network drive for $250.

The ADS network storage drive kit comes with
software to turn into an Internet file server. More info at
www.adstech.com.

The easiest way to get a list of files is to
drop back into DOS, the operating system that ran PCs for years before
Windows came along and still lies buried inside. Moving right along
here, the author notes that he's never seen a registry cleaner that was
worth a darn, so don't worry about cleaning the registry because it's
not going to make your computer run faster anyway.

The author also has little faith in
antivirus programs, and recommends a free one called AVG Anti-Virus Free
Edition (get it at
www.download.com). Which brings up another tip: If you're using
Internet Explorer or Firefox as your Web browser, just type in the main
part of a Web site address -- "download," for instance -- and then hit
control-return; the browser will automatically fill in the rest.

The author hosts a Web site providing
solutions to many Windows problems; check it out at
www.askwoody.com. Or just type "askwoody" and hit control-return.